


A Master Swordsman and a Former Slave

by zorofangirl



Series: A Master Swordsman and a Former Slave [1]
Category: One Piece
Genre: Drama & Romance, F/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-27
Updated: 2019-02-27
Packaged: 2019-11-06 08:12:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17936084
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zorofangirl/pseuds/zorofangirl
Summary: Zoro knew that if he was going to become the world's greatest swordsman, he didn't need the liability of a woman hanging around. Fate, however, has other plans for him: there happens to be one woman that only he can protect, and for some reason, some part of him actually wants to.Zoro x OC. Rated M for later. I know, I'm bad at descriptions





	1. 1 - chance encounter

Zoro sighed and narrowed his eyes at the ground. He’d never admit it to anyone who asked, but he was completely lost. He’d been traveling alone in the East Blue for about a year, bounty hunting here and there to make a living. He’d barely made a living. 

On this particular day, though, he had just come from turning in a couple of pirates to the authorities, and his pockets were well-lined, but he didn’t even know the name of the island he was on, much less have a ship to take him away. He had two options: purchase a small boat for himself or stow away on a larger ship. For now, though, an inn in town would suffice. If he could collect a few more bounties on this island, he’d be able to afford a small ship for sure.

He walked around aimlessly, lost out of his mind, but certain that if he went in one direction long enough, he’d find what he was looking for.  
What was he looking for?

Zoro’s life had become empty as of late; he had his daily arduous training, and his lifetime goal to become the world’s greatest swordsman, but he wasn’t sure he could reach that goal as a bounty hunter in the east blue. He needed to get to the grand line and the new world, to really make a name for himself. If only he could find an inn in this small town.

He was so lost in thought, that he nearly missed the crumpled figure laying in a passing alley. Now usually, when someone was passed out in an alleyway, he would chalk it up to drunkenness and be on his way, but this one might have a bounty. He noted that this person had long silvery-lavender hair and began flicking through his bingo book for someone matching that description.

He even went so far as to walk up and turn the person onto their back, just to get a look at his face. What he saw confused him: a girl, coated with grime, barely dressed in a pair of shorts and a baggy tee shirt. all over her legs and arms he could see scars. He dropped her almost immediately when he saw it was a woman—he wanted nothing to do with that.

And so, he left her.

As he walked, though, his mind continuously drifted back to her lavender hair and the way her frail body felt in his hands, and he couldn’t help but wonder what color her eyes were. She’d been so small, so delicate, to be passed out in the alley like that. What had happened to her, he wondered.  
He found an inn eventually, got himself a room for the week, and took a nice relaxing shower. Afterwards, he sat by the window and studied his East Blue bingo book, always scanning for a fresh bounty. Once he was sure that he’d memorized every face in the book, he made his way up to the roof of the inn, swords in tow, to practice until long after the sun had set, at which point he needed booze.

Zoro was no stranger to drinking alone. Since he left the dojo, he’d never really had companions, and he never missed the human interaction. If anything, relationships only got in the way of hard work—they take up time and energy and effort, all of which could be dedicated to sword training.

For some reason, though, as he drank his absurdly large beer, his mind flickered back to the girl in the alley. He wondered if she was still there, and how many nights she’d spent by herself on the cold street. Inexplicably, he found himself wanting to go get her, to bring her back to his room with him and clean her up and care for her in some way. He shook his head and took an extra-large sip. He could never adopt a woman into his life, especially not a frail and needy one. And anyways, he wouldn’t even be able to find her if he tried. He was lost when he first saw her, and he didn’t fancy getting lost again.

As luck would have it, though, as Zoro walked back towards his inn, he heard the sound of bare feet slapping on the sidewalk. When he turned, the first thing he saw were bright blue eyes, punctuated by flecks of pink and purple. Her eyes were wide and terrified, her hair whipping behind her, her clothes out-of-place. As she ran past Zoro, he realized that she was not running for fun, but being chased.

“Just let me have a little more,” the semi-drunk pirate was imploring her. Zoro watched as someone—probably one of the pirate’s henchmen—blocked her path from in front, effectively cornering her. 

He watched as they approached her, one of them grabbing her arms, the other cupping her crotch with one hand. She cried out in a desperate whimper, and before Zoro could think rationally, he was running towards her with one hand on his sword.

“I suggest you drop the lady,” he said darkly, pulling the wado ichimonji halfway from its sheath.

“I would,” the pirate with his hand still stroking her crotch said, “but I don’t see any lady here.”

“Cut the crap,” Zoro said, fully unsheathing the sword, “if you don’t let her go, you will regret it.”  
Suddenly, the second man—the one pinning her arms behind her back—recoiled with a look of recognition. “Three swords and green hair…that’s the pirate hunter zoro,” he said in a suddenly shaky voice. “Let’s get out of here,” as soon as he let go of the woman’s arms, she collapsed ungracefully into a pile on the ground.  
Zoro couldn’t help but feel a twinge of pride at being recognized. He’d worked hard for his reputation, and it was quite a step to have lowlife pirates running away from him.

Gingerly, he stooped down and gathered up the girl in his arms. He just couldn’t leave her on the street after seeing how those men treated her. He hadn’t thought earlier that she would be attacked that very day, or touched so roughly by such lowlifes. “Leave me,” she murmured, her body limp, “just let me die,” but Zoro couldn’t listen to her. Something strong inside of him was telling him that it was extremely important to save this woman.

Carrying her, he could feel just how light she was. She was thin and bony, not in the least bit healthy. Her cheeks were hollowed and her hair was stringy, not to mention the fact that she was dark with dirt. “Please don’t hurt me,” she was saying, amongst other things. An endless stream of misery seemed to run from her mouth, “I’ll do anything, just leave me here, I don’t want to be a slave again.”

Again?

Zoro cocked his head to the side, “what would make you think that I want to make you a slave?”

She blinked at him, “they called you a hunter.”

“Of pirates. I hunt pirates. Not innocent little girls.”

He couldn’t help but notice that her face darkened when he called her ‘innocent.’ “where are you taking me?”

“you’ll see,” he responded. He hadn’t been ready to field questions when he committed his needless good deed. The owner of the inn stared at him as he carried the filthy girl in his arms, but he ignored the old man and focused on the girl’s blue eyes until they were at his room. As soon as he placed her on her feet, she swayed back and forth a few times before falling to her knees. She was truly incredibly skinny.

“I’ll run you a bath,” Zoro said in an attempt at gentleness, walking into the bathroom and setting up a bath for the girl. When he walked back into the main room, she hadn’t moved. She was on her hands and knees, looking painfully at the ground. 

“I can’t,” she murmured, “can’t do anything,” she looked up at him miserably, “I haven’t eaten in…weeks, I can’t do it, just let me die.”

Zoro rolled his eyes, “just strip,” he said, a little embarrassed, “I’ll help you.”

She obediently began to take her clothes off. She wasn’t wearing anything beneath the tee shirt and shorts. Zoro couldn’t help but notice three things about her body. First, her small breasts and the way they seemed as starved as the rest of her body. The second thing he noticed were the scars, they ran all over her body. Some were rough and jagged, the others from clean cuts. The third thing was, of course, the strange mark branded on her ribcage. It must’ve hurt to be branded over the bone like that.

“let’s get you in the tub,” he said, placing one hand on her back, which she initially flinched away from, and guiding her into the bathroom.  
She sank into the tub with a grateful groan, and the grime immediately started falling away from her body, showing Zoro a pale, almost-translucent skin tone that he could see himself easily becoming obsessed with. As he scrubbed her back, he marveled at how much paler than his hand her skin was, and how small her back looked under his hands. 

Suddenly the thought struck him: what am I doing? He’d just been thinking about how women were a nuisance, how he didn’t need anybody, yet here he was with this naked girl, giving her a bath, with no plans of letting her out of his sight anytime soon.

“This is the first time,” she said quietly, “that anyone’s ever cared about me. Why do you care?” He was a bit taken aback by her words. Why did he care?

“I don’t know,” he answered truthfully, and with the washcloth he continued to wipe away the dirt, now from her stomach. She shivered when he wiped over her slave brand, and he wondered—whose slave had she been? How had she been freed? What was any free person doing with this brand? Would she become a liability for him if her owners ever showed up?

He finished washing her, from head to toe, and wrapped her up in one of his tee shirts before putting her into his bed. “I’m going to get some food for us,” he said carefully, “if you’re okay staying alone.”

She nodded once. When he returned with two loaves of bread, though, she was already asleep.


	2. 2 - Savior

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Zoro saves the mystery girl from a band of pirates

Zoro woke the next morning to an empty room and an open window. After a quick search of his room, he ascertained that she was, in fact, nowhere to be found. Well I guess that’s it for this experiment, he thought to himself, gathering up his swords to go and train.

Just outside of the town was a thick woods, split in half by a wide creek and punctuated by small clearings. He busied himself gathering rocks to lift in place of weights, but his mind kept drifting back to the girl. She had obviously jumped from his second-second-story window to escape, but where had she gone? She was very clear the night before that she had no one and Zoro was the first to offer her kindness. Why did she want to get away from him, then? As he considered this, he felt a strange twist in his chest: a small voice wondering what he had done wrong.

He shook the thought away and continued to gather rocks.

For the next week, he passed his days training and his nights stalking for bounties. He caught a couple of minor ones, but he’d gotten wind of some rumors that a bigger pirate group was in town. Night after night he scoured pub after pub in search of a pirate called Crazy-Eyed Edmund. He would, of course, drink heavily at all of these pubs, but never heavily enough to truly impair himself.

He found Crazy-eye after about four days of searching, and completely by chance. He actually saw the first mate, white-glove Rico, returning to the ship with some other lackeys. Rico was in the bingo books for ten million, the captain had a nice forty-million on his head. The two of them together would line his pockets nicely.  
Quietly, he began to follow the crew.

“And get this,” Rico was saying, “she’s already a slave.”

“Already?” one of the lackeys responded wondrously, “so she won’t need any training?”

Rico made a sound of affirmation, “the captain still took the measures of tying her up, but she’ll fetch a fine price.”

“And until then, warm our beds nicely,” the other man said with a laugh.

Zoro felt his blood run cold. Were they talking about who he thought they were talking about? If they had captured a girl who was already a slave, what were the chances that it was his girl that was already a slave? It had been about five days since the girl escaped from his room, could she have been captured by these pirates in that time?  
He suddenly felt, in the pit of his stomach, an overwhelming urge to fight these pirates. He resisted, however, until he followed them to the dock and watched them board the ship. After that, he waited another twenty minutes or so for extra measure before letting himself up the rope ladder and onto the deck, where the men were all drinking. He made himself known immediately, slashing the mast straight down the middle so that it careened over, smashing a small ship docked beside theirs.  
The men began yelling, as they always did. “It’s pirate hunter Zoro!” One cried out as Zoro knocked them out one after the other with his swords. 

It took him about five minutes, but he managed to knock out every man on the deck, tying up only Rico, as he was the only one with a bounty.

Inside the ship, he encountered many more men, but none as strong as he was, and certainly no captain. He continued going deeper and deeper into the ship until he was almost sure it was empty. It was in the last room where he found them.

The captain, Crazy-eyed Edmund, sat at a desk, writing something. Tied up on the bed behind him was the girl Zoro had saved. Her lavender hair fell all around her face and across the bed, mostly hiding her features from his view. She was bound with her arms behind her back and her legs together, a gag in her mouth and blindfold over her eyes. She still had on Zoro’s tee shirt from the night that he bathed her, though it was slashed down the front.

“What are you doing here!?” The captain asked gruffly. He did, indeed, have a crazy eye. Zoro, unfeeling, sliced the man straight through the chest and he fell to the ground, dead. He stood over the man’s figure, looking down darkly, wondering if he had touched the girl. Then, he walked over to the small lavender-haired figure on the bed.  
.  
She had been so sure that he was out to get her when she escaped from his room at the inn. He was a man, big and strong the way that she hated for men to be. Big strong men had never gotten along with her, never been nice to her or even treated her with a touch of sympathy. So, when this big and strong green-haired man was suddenly acting gentle and kind towards her, she couldn’t help but feel suspicious.

Once she was out of his room and on the street, she immediately wished that she could go back. The thing about her life, though, was that there was no such thing as going back. There was only one direction she could move in, and that direction was away from this man.

Her stomach felt cold and empty, her feet cold and bare. She padded along the street, looking wholly waif-ish, wondering what misfortune would befall her next. She’d never even learned her savior’s name, not that names mattered much to her. There was only one name she’d ever bothered learning, the name of her former master. He had ruined all names for her.

She found a soft pile of trash to spend the night on, and within that trash was a half a loaf of not-too-moldy bread that she gagged down with a bit of difficulty. She’d been on this island for at least a year, and people were used to seeing her around the trash. She normally wasn’t bothered, unless it was by tourists or pirates.  
Speaking of pirates, they began stalking her a day later. She noticed one of them as she walked aimlessly around town, following her every move with his dark eyes. Throughout the day, they grew in number and the sightings became more frequent: they were surrounding her.

She assumed, erroneously, that they would only want to use her and then drop her in a gutter, the way that pirates usually did. She never expected to be captured. As they approached her, she put her hands up in a way to make herself seem non-threatening. She didn’t want to fight, she was submissive to their demands.

“How cute,” one of them said crudely, then she was knocked upside the head.

When she woke up, she was on the deck of a ship, gagged and tied. The men stood around contemplating what to do with her. “Take her to saboady and sell her?” one was suggesting. Fear coursed in her veins, but she was completely immobilized. She couldn’t scream or thrash, only look around with terrified eyes.

“She’s awake,” one of the pirates said, and another—presumably the captain—walked up to her. He had one intense eye and one lazy eye, she noticed as he grabbed her by the hair and pulled her up.

“What's a pretty little thing like you doing in the trash?” He asked, and reached out with one hand to rip her shirt down the middle. Not her shirt--the shirt the kind man had given her. She tried to sob as it shredded, but only a faint gargling sound came out around the gag. He poked and prodded at her breasts, pinching a nipple painfully between two fingers. “Not too bad, eh?” He asked the rest of the crew and they cheered with delight. “And what's this?” He asked, his fingers brushing over her slave mark. She jerked away. “A bad little slave, aren’t you?” He teased as she tried to jerk away, “we’ll make you wish you were a good girl who stayed put with her master, won't we men?” His men cheered again.

She was teased and kicked and choked and slapped by the men as they drank and stood around. There was nothing she could do. Was she going to be their slave? would she be sold to a new owner? One thing she was certain of; her freedom was gone forever. 

“Look, she's crying,” one of the men jeered, jamming the toe of his boot against her wet cheek. She closed her eyes and cried harder.

For the next two nights she was raped repeatedly, the gag never removed and the ropes never untied. Her jaw felt like it was going to become unhinged and her hands were numb. The men kept her in the deepest bowels of the ship, in the captains courters. They would take turns coming by to ‘check up on’ her.

The only one, surprisingly, who didn’t touch her at all was the captain. He seemed to have contempt for her, as he would sit in the corner at his desk and check charts for hours as she lay immobile behind him. She would drift in and out of consciousness—a blindfold was added to her ensemble, but it didn’t bother her. She tried her hardest to meditate so her soul could flee to a different world. To a certain extent, it worked. But when a man was with her, it was hard to be absent. She would simply remain still and cry until it was over.

She was losing her orientation completely: she had no idea if it was day or night, whether the ship was still docked or not. She had no idea how much time had passed when she suddenly heard the door thunder open and the captain shout “what are you doing here!?” After that she heard a scuffle, a thud, and footsteps coming towards her.

First, Zoro untied the gag from behind her head. She immediately began to take raspy, sharp breaths, like she was having a panic attack. The next thing Zoro took off was her mask, avoiding her eyes as he began to work at the ropes around her wrists.

“You saved me,” she breathed, “I was going to be a slave again, but you…” tears were forming in her eyes. “You saved me,” she babbled, then began to sob. She shook violently with the tears as he untied the ropes around her wrists and ankles. He then lifted her with one arm—easily given her small stature—and carried her gingerly up to the deck of the ship.

“can you stand?” He asked and she nodded, her eyes empty. Zoro went back down to fetch his bounty, and she followed closely behind him the whole time, one hand on the tail of his shirt. 

She followed him quietly like that as he carried the two men—one in each arm—to the local marine headquarters, collected his fifty million, and headed back to the inn. She didn’t say a word or make an expression the whole time, just shyly and gingerly followed in his footsteps until they were in front of the inn again.

“Are you coming in?” Zoro asked her, and she nodded once. He felt a weight lift in his chest at the thought of being able to keep her within his sights and he led her back to the room that they had shared for a night earlier that week.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's the second chapter! Enjoy :)

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first chapter! I just sort of whipped this up, so let me know whatever y'all think of it.


End file.
